Mark Levine

Mark LeVine

"Along with Tikkun magazine Editor Michael Lerner, I founded the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning in 1995 (see history) and was its first National Coordinator. I am a former Fulbright-Hays Fellow and completed my Ph.D. at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, after which I spent a year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. During the last year, I also served on the organizing committee of the Re-Imagining Politics conference put on by the Foundation, and was the Culture/Music coordinator for the Shadow Conventions organized by Arianna Huffington, Call to Renewal, United For a Fair Economy, the Lindesmith Center, and other organizations.

"I am spending the 2000-2001 academic year as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advances Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where I'm exploring Middle Easterna and European cultural experiences of and responses to globalization in comparative context with the goal of using these perspective to increase our understanding of how these processes are shaping America's politics, culture and economy. In addition to my academic and Foundation activities, I am a journalist and Contributing Editor to Tikkun magazine, and am also a professional musician, working with musicians such as Mick Jagger, Dr. John, Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins, Chuck D, Michael Franti, and other R&B and hip-hop acts. Lately, having soured on the music business--and the music it produces--I have been studying Middle Eastern and gypsy music, and am recording and performing with French-Israeli singer Sara Alexander and a diverse group of world musicians, both in the Middle East and France. The combination of my musical, scholarly and activist activities has lead me to found the "culture jamming" project, which will bring together artists, activists and scholars from around the world to examine how these three disciplines can interact more fruitfully within the struggles to imagine and realize alternative, holistic paradigms of globalization. My new website, www.culturejamming.org, is currently under construction."